Kindred

Kindred by Octavia Butler is a story of a African American woman from modern times named Dana, who inexplicably travels back and forth in time to the era of southern slavery. It provides a first hand accounting of the brutality necessary to keep an entire race of people enslaved.

Dana is propelled back in time when a young boy named Rufus is in dire trouble. Initially her time junkets are short, but she and her husband are eventually stuck in the past for long tracts of time. Dana is actually a direct but distant descendant of Rufus and a free-born black woman named Alice. Rufus morphs from a relatively decent yet intolerant and bigoted young boy, into a tyrannical and brutal man reminiscent of his father Tom Weylan. Dana’s role is to save Rufus from harm, care for her illiterate grandmother-to-be, and generally survive in a time when a black woman had no rights.

Is it an injustice for Dana to encourage Alice to let Rufus rape her with the intention of getting her pregnant and thus insuring her own birth? Yes it is an injustice. Even in the murky world of time travel the ends do not justify the means. Dana’s behavior in this matter is selfish and inexcusable. She was unable explain why she was able to time travel, but she was sure if the two didn’t copulate then she would never be born. I could not understand how Dana could do this, and I never really got past this paradox. By encouraging Alice to let Rufus rape her, Dana is party to rape, and thus participating in the very oppression she knew from her perspective to be wrong. Was it ok for Dana to do this in the past because it was socially acceptable for a white slave owner to rape a black slave? If it is, she is no better then the example of Thomas Jefferson we used in class and from the Takaki reading. If Dana would have done this in her own time she would have been found guilty of being an accomplice to rape in a court of law. Just because she did it in a time when it was socially acceptable, she is just as culpable or possible more culpable then anyone doing it in modern times.

The aspect I liked most about this novel was the interpersonal relationships. History texts are full of facts and figures, but they cannot capture the specter of slavery in the intimate terms like this book does. The history of slavery, as I have learned it, does highlight the physical brutality of African Americans, but it fails to capture psychological brutality like this book does. It is clear from the reading that the slaves could have organized and rose up against their oppressors at any given time, but the psychological punishment prevented them from doing anything more than just thinking about it. This fact is all too often understated.